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Is there a way to enable the netbios name in a Linux without using Samba?

What I want is that I would like the hostname (or whatever) to appear when other computers (MS Windows) is scanning the device through ethernet. This is achieved by netbios. Samba has an application called nmbd that will do the trick. But Samba will take up more that 0.5MB in my compressed image. Which is bursting my partitions. And I don't want to spend that much flash and ram on such a trivial function anyway. (I'm using an embedded linux device btw.)

Does anyone know another way? An alternative to nmbd perhaps?

Illishar
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I'm not aware of any free software alternatives to nmbd. The nmbd from older versions of Samba might be smaller in size. Alternatively, you might be able to use the nmbd from Samba-TNG .

Or if you're really feeling adventurous, you might be able to write your own (if you just care about the name appearing). See http://ubiqx.org/cifs/NetBIOS.html.

jelmer
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  • It's a nice article. Although I think it gave me a small heart attack! I might take a look at the samba-tng. – Illishar Mar 29 '12 at 07:21
  • The samba-tng like samba seems to be gigantic. And the nmbd doesn't seem to contain any excess code. (Although I can't know for sure.) NetBIOS might just be one of those protocols that does very little, with extreme amounts of code. :-/ – Illishar Mar 30 '12 at 07:25
  • nmbd contains quite a bit of excess code, in both Samba and Samba-TNG. It's fairly heavily tied in to the SMB code. – jelmer Apr 09 '12 at 22:18
  • I've found an alternative I think: http://www.skullsecurity.org/blog/2008/nbtool-002-released-also-a-primer-on-netbios. At least it might be a good start out point for a custom implementation. – Illishar Jun 25 '13 at 10:14